Sketch of the history CHAP. XXXIV. tally forgetting himself and his own secular interest, with that also of his family, he laboured incessantly to promote God's honour and the people's welfare, which on many occasions he showed were dearer to him than his own life. Moses was in every respect a great man; for every virtue that constitutes genuine nobility was concentred in his mind, and fully displayed in his conduct. He ever conducted himself as a man conscious of his own integrity, and of the guidance and protection of God, under whose orders he constantly acted. He therefore betrays no confusion in his views, nor indecision in his measures; he was ever without anxiety, because he was conscious of the rectitude of his motives, and that the cause which he espoused was the cause of God, and that his power and faithfulness were pledged for his support. His courage and fortitude were unshaken and unconquerable, because his reliance was unremittingly fixed on the unchangeableness of JEHOVAH. He left Egypt having an eye to the recompense of reward in another world, and never lost sight of this grand object; he was therefore neither discouraged by difficulties, nor elated by prosperity. He who in Egypt refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, thereby renouncing the claim he might have had on the Egyptian throne, was never likely to be influenced by secular views in the government of the miserable multitudes which he led out of that country. His renunciation of the court of Pharaoh and its advantages was the amplest proof that he neither sought nor expected honour or emolument in the wilderness, among a people who had scarcely any thing but what they received by immediate miracle from the hand of God. I have more than once had occasion to note the disinterestedness of Moses in reference to his family, as well as to himself. This is a singular case; his own tribe, that of Levi, he left without any earthly possession and though to minister to God was the most honourable employment, yet the Levites could never arise to any political consequence in Israel. Even his own sons became blended in the common mass of the Levites, and possessed no kind of distinction among their brethren. Though his confidence in God was ever unshaken, yet he had a life of toil and perpetual distress, occasioned by the ignorance, obstinacy, and baseness, of the people over whom he presided; and he died in their service, leaving no other property but his tent behind him. Of the spoils taken in war we never read of the portion of Moses. He had none, he wanted none; his treasure was in heaven, and where his treasure was, there also was his heart. By this disinterestedness of Moses two points are fully proved: 1. That he was satisfied, fully so, that his mission was Divine, and that in it he served the living God; and 2. That he believed in the immortality of the soul, and the doctrine of future rewards and punishments, and therefore he laboured so to pass through things temporal, that he might not lose the things that are eternal. It is strange that the faith of Moses in these points should be questioned by any who had ever seriously read the Pentateuch. The manner in which he bore the sentence of his exclusion from the promised inheritance, is an additional proof of his persuasion of the reality of the in and character of Moses. visible world. No testiness, no murmuring, no expatiating on former services; no passionate entreaties to have the sentence reversed, appear in the spirit or conduct of this truly great man. He bowed to the decision of that justice which he knew could not act wrong; and having buried the world, as to himself, he had no earthly attachments; he was obeying the will of God in leading the people, and therefore, when his Master chose to dismiss him from this service, he was content; and saw, without regret or envy, another appointed to his office. The moral character of Moses is almost immaculate. That he offended Jehovah at the waters of Meribah there can be no doubt; but in what the offence consisted, commentators and critics are greatly at a loss to ascertain. In the note on Num. xx. 12, I have said all that I believe should be said upon the point; and after all, conjecture is obliged to come in, to supply the place of substantial evidence; and the fault is so slight, humanly speaking, as even to glide away from the eye of conjecture itself. Had the offence, whatever it was, been committed by any ordinary person, it would probably have passed between God and the conscience without any public reprehension. But Moses was great, and supereminently favoured; and a fault in him derived much of its moral delinquency from these very circumstances. He did not sanctify the Lord in the sight of the people-he did not fully show that God himself was the sole worker; he appeared by his conduct to exhibit himself as an agent indispensably necessary in the promised miraculous supply; and this might have had the most dangerous consequences on the minds of this gross people, had not God thus marked it with his displeasure. This awful lesson to the legislator taught the people that their help came from GOD, and not from man; and that consequently they must repose their confidence in HIM alone. But this subject deserves to be more distinctly considered, as in the account given of his death this offence is again brought forth to view. God himself thus details the circumstances: "Get thee up into this mountain, and behold the land of Canaan-and die in the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto thy people as Aaron thy brother, because ye trespassed against me AMONG THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL; because ye sanctified me not in the midst of the children of Israel;" chap. xxxii. 49-51. "And Moses went up unto the mountain of Nebo, and the Lord showed him all the land; and the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither: so Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there, according to the word of the Lord; and he buried him;" chap. xxxiv. 1-6. In the above extracts, all the circumstances relative to this event are brought into one point of view; and we see plainly the stress that is laid on the offence against God. YE TRESPASSED AGAINST ME AMONG THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL-YE SANCTIFIED ME NOT IN THE MIDST OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL. These words may be understood thus: The people of themselves were too much prone to take off their eye from GOD, consult their senses, and depend upon man; and the netch of the history DEUTERONOMY. and character of Moses. 66 true God which the apostle states him to have had; and that faith by which he realized spiritual and invisible things, and through which he despised all worldly grandeur and secular emolument. By faith," says the apostle, "Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt; for he had respect unto the recompense of the reward," Heb. xi. 24, &c. This certainly implies a degree of religious knowledge, as things, which we can scarcely ever suppose to have been at all the result of an Egyptian education. But we shall cease to be pressed with any difficulty here, manner in which Moses and Aaron performed the miracle which God commanded them to do in his name, was such as to confirm them in the carnality of their views, and cause them to depend on an arm of flesh. Ye therefore shall not go into the promised land, said the Lord: and the death of them both was the fullest proof to this people that it was not by might nor by power, but by the Spirit of the Lord of hosts, that their enemies were expelled, and that themselves were introduced and established in the promised inheritance. This seems to be the spirit of the whole business and as Moses had no other end in view but the glory of God, it must have been a supreme satis-sociated with an experimental acquaintance with Divine faction to his pious soul, that this end was so effectually promoted, though even at the expense of his life. 1. At a distant view there appears to be very little observable in the death of Moses; but on a nearer ap-when we consider the circumstance of his being proproach we shall find it to have been the most honourable, I might add the most glorious, with which any human being was ever favoured. As to his death itself, it is simply said, He died in the land of Moab— according to the word of the Lord. He was, as has already been observed, in familiar conversation with his Maker; and while in the act of viewing the land, and receiving the last information relative to it, the ancient covenant with the patriarchs, and the performance of the covenant in putting their posterity into possession of this goodly inheritance, he yielded up the ghost, and suddenly passed from the verge of the earthly into the heavenly Canaan. Thus, without the labour and the delay of passing through the type, he entered at once into the possession of the antitype; having simply lost the honour of leading the people a little farther, whom, with so much care and solicitude, he had brought thus far. 2. There is another circumstance in his death which requires particular notice. It is said, He died-according to the word of the Lord: the original words hy al pi Yehovah, signify literally at (or upon) the mouth of Jehovah ; which Jonathan ben Uzziel interprets thus: " by al neshikath meymera dayeya, “by a kiss of the WORD of Jehovah ;" and this has given rise to an ancient tradition among the Jews, "that God embraced Moses, and drew his soul out of his body by a kiss.". The Targumist adds, that this was 66 on the seventh day of the month Adar, the same day of the same month on which he was born." 3. The last circumstance worthy of note is, that God buried him, which is an honour no human being ever received besides himself. From the tradition referred to by Saint Jude, ver. 9, it appears that Michael, the archangel, was employed on this occasion; that Satan disputed the matter with him, probably wishing the burial-place of Moses to be known, that it might become an excitement to superstition and idolatry; but being rebuked by the Lord, he was obliged to give over the contention; and though the place of burial was probably the valley of the mountain on which Moses had been conversing with God, and where he died, yet Satan himself could not ascertain the spot, and no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. 4. It may be asked how Moses, who was bred up at an idolatrous court, which he did not quit till the fortieth year of his age, got that acquaintance with the | videntially nursed by his own mother, under the authority and direction of the Egyptian princess. This gave him the privilege of frequent intercourse with his parents, and others of the Hebrews, who worshipped the true God; and from them he undoubtedly learned all the great truths of that religion which were taught and practised among the patriarchs. The circumstance of his Hebrew origin, his exposure on the Nile, his being found and adopted by the daughter of Pharaoh, were facts which could not be concealed, and must have been notorious at the Egyptian court; and when these points are considered, we need not be surprised that he never could be so identified among the Egyptians as that his Hebrew extraction should be forgotten. That the person whom God designed to be the deliverer of his people should have been a Hebrew by birth, and have retained all his natural attachment to his own people, and yet have been brought up by Pharaoh's daughter, and had all the advantages of a highlyfinished education, which the circumstances of his own family could not have afforded, is all a master-piece of wisdom in the designs of the Divine providence. Besides, Moses by this education must have been well known, and even popular among the Egyptians; and therefore the subsequent public part he took in behalf of the Hebrews must have excited the greater attention and procured him the greater respect both among the Egyptians and his own people. All these circumstances taken together show the manifold wisdom and gracious providence of God. 5. Thus end the life and the work of the writer of the Pentateuch, who, by the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which he has amassed in those five books, has enriched the whole civilized earth, and indeed greatly promoted that very civilization. His works, we may justly say, have been a kind of text-book to almost every writer on geology, geography, chronology, astronomy, natural history, ethics, jurisprudence, political economy, theology, poetry, and criticism, from his time to the present day. Books, to which the choicest writers and philosophers in pagan antiquity have been deeply indebted, and which were the text-books to all the prophets; books from which the flimsy writers against Divine Revelation have derived their natural religion, and all their moral excellence; books written in all the energy and purity of the incomparable lan Sketch of the History and Character of Moses. guage in which they are composed; and finally, books which, for importance of matter, variety of information, dignity of sentiment, accuracy of facts, impartiality, simplicity, and sublimity of narration, tending to improve and ennoble the intellect, and meliorate the physical and moral condition of man, have never been equalled, and can only be paralleled by the GOSPEL of the Son of God! Fountain of endless mercy, justice, truth, and beneficence! how much are thy gifts and bounties neglected by those who do not read this law; and by those who, having read it, are not morally improved by it, and made wise unto salvation! a On the whole we may remark, that when God calls any person to an extraordinary work, he so orders it, in the course of his providence, that he shall have every qualification necessary for that work. This was the case with Moses: his Hebrew extraction, the comeliness of his person, his Egyptian education, his natural firmness and constancy of character, all concurred with the influences of the Divine Spirit, to make him in every respect such a person, one among millions, who was every way qualified for the great work which God had given him to do; and who performed it according to the mind of his Maker. SERVANT OF GOD, WELL DONE! 847 EXODUS. GENESIS. A GENERAL VIEW OF ALL THE SECTIONS OF THE LAW, AND OF THE PROPHETS, As read in the different Jewish Synagogues, for every Sabbath of the Year. In the above chapters and verses I have, in general, followed the divisions in the best Masoretic Bibles, from which our common English Bibles will in some cases be found to differ a little. In the synagogues the law is read entirely through in the fifty Sabbaths of their lunar year; for they join certain sections together, which are noticed at the end of the tables. But in their intercalated years, in which they add a month, they have then fifty-four Sabbaths, and this is one reason why we find fifty-four Pareshahs, and fifty-four Haphtaras, instead of fifty-two. See the concluding tables. It has already been observed that when Antiochus Epiphanes conquered the Jews, about the year 168 before the Christian era, he forbade the law to be publicly read in the synagogues, on pain of death. The Jews, that they might not be wholly deprived of the word of God, selected from other parts of the sacred writings fifty-four portions, which were termed HAPHTARAS, a haphtaroth, from patar, he dismissed, let loose, opened-for though the Law was dismissed from their synagogues, and was closed to them by the edict of this persecuting king, yet the prophetic writings, not being under the interdict, were left open, and therefore they used them in place of the others. It was from this custom of the Jews, that the primitive Christians adopted theirs of reading a lesson every Sabbath out of the old and New Testaments; and on this custom the practice of the Church in our own country, in reading certain portions of the epistles and Gospels every Sunday in the year was founded. As a proper knowledge of these Haphtaras or prophetical sections may sometimes help to fix the chronology of some events in the New Testament, it hath been deemed proper to give a table of them in connection with the Pareshioth or sections of the law, in the place of which they were originally read; and with which, ever since the days of the Asmoneans or Maccabees, they continue to be read in the various synagogues belonging to the English, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and German Jews. From the above tables the reader will perceive that though the Jews are agreed in the sections of the law that are read every Sabbath, yet they are not agreed in the Haphtaras or sections from the prophets; as it appears above, that the Dutch and German Jews differ in several cases from the Italian and Portuguese; and there are some slighter variations besides those above, which I have not noticed |